In my opinion if you are looking to better yourself and make a living from editing or post there really is only one choice and that’s Avid.

From it's media management to it's stability... God knows how many times we’ve all lost work when your system crashes. Well I'm proud to say that it hasn't happened to me on Avid. Also a big plus is that if you are looking to broadcast, then take a look around and see for yourself most broadcasters use Avid. It makes business sense to move to Avid. Also it's great that it can be used on Mac & PC, so your OS still feels familiar, hence only needing to learn the program at hand.

Javier Valledor
Australia
www.whydocumentaries.com.au

 

I started on Avid a long time ago - I'm not that old, don't worry - and got interested in FCP when 1.0 started to ship.

But I also followed Avid's first attempts at software only, and later cut a documentary with hours of footage using XPress Pro 4.0 - which was I believe the first XPress Pro soft-only on Mac. Though it was nightmarish - couldn't do a viewing without having the sound slipping out of sync slowly but surely - it had great potential and working on a 2 hours timeline was the same as working on a 10 minutes timeline. Which was then (and still is) a weakness of FCP: more than 30 minutes in a Timeline and each tiny change would bring the "Refreshing Video Display" window for a while. At that point, I started following both applications. I had tried XPress DV but it was so crippled that I would have never considered it for proper editing, but XPress Pro began to feel like a small Media Composer. From version 4.11 (I think) it became very usable. To be completely honest, FCP was still one of the apps I used most for one reason: it was falling off the van easily... All you needed was a G4, there was always a friend of a friend who had a copy.

I was then at the early stages of my carreer as an editor: if a production company would hire me and get an Avid, fine I was delighted to work on it. If the film was a low-to-no-budget or a personnal project, I would go for FCP since it would be cut on my own machine. XPress cost around 1800$ back then, and for me that was the price of a computer! Then I got my first XPress Pro, offered as payment by a production company. At that point, the choice of the software to edit on was driven by the film: Avid if I was to do everything from my machine, or if there was a budget to finish on a Symphony or any other "big" Avid, and FCP if the film involved spending a long time editing, between paid jobs, as I didn't want to lend my dongle for too long. Also if the film was going to involve effects, rough compositing, mixing the sound in the Timeline or even doing subtitles! Sometimes, I would use both apps: Avid to edit, and FCP to finish. And of course, if the producer had made the choice for me, then I would adapt. Which is how my personnal trend started to reverse.

I took over an edit which had started a year before, and they had chosen FCP. A documentary shot on DV, with nearly 1000 hours of material (yes, one thousand!). Cutting was ok, but the project maintenance was hell: they had digitized without any care nor logic, there were rushes within folders within folders, some of the drive would behave badly (Lacie crappy), and it was taking literally 10 minutes just to open the project in the morning. As soon as the Timeline contained more than 30 minutes, the whole thing slowed down. Projects were getting fatter all the time, for no reason. Autosave would stop you for nearly a minute each time. And the "Match Bin" (or Find Bin) feature didn't work because the rushes were all over the place. But there was no way we were going to redigitize everything (or even transcode it) into an Avid.
Roughly at the same period, I gave a hand on a feature, shot on film, at 24fps, and the producers had decided to cut it on FCP. Since I was often called for my FCP skills, I worked with them, during the setup of the installation. Things were not as smooth as Apple wanted us to believe: ok, Murch had cut Cold Mountain on FCP but he had an army of assistants and a Hollywood budget. We didn't. And worse: we were working in PAL, which runs at 25fps... That film was a complete nightmare: the editor didn't like the software and expected it to work like a Film Composer (workhorse), the machine was unstable, synchronising sound and picture was hell (and clips would lose the sync all the time), managing keycode was terrible and so on. I fell out with the producer - who needed someone to blame I think - and decided that never again I would touch film and 24fps with FCP. I think they ended up doing an EDL and eyematching each keycode before cutting the neg.

The producers of the documentary with a 1000 hours of footage also had a Mojo, gathering dust on a shelf. They bought it and never used it. At that time, I had two (maybe three already?) Avid dongles. So I was more keen on lending a dongle since I would still have one left. I started borrowing their Mojo to edit other films, and started loving it. It was kind of stable (would always crash once in the morning, like me if I pushed out of bed too quickly!) and it made Xpress Pro as zippy as a Media Composer Meridien! I also tested it on a short film shot at 24fps and on 16mm with keycode and sync and all that business. The machine worked as well as a Film Composer.

So last year, not long after Avid had come up with XPress 5.5, I was hired to edit a feature film, fiction shot on film at 24fps and sync sound recorded on Cantar. They had not a lot of money, but had budgeted enough to cut on Film Composer, hiring one of those many v.7 ABVB which are still around in the film business. I told them that I had a cheaper and better solution: I noticed that they had a G5 which they were using for docs and shorts, using... FCP and a Sony DSR11. I worked out a budget for them: XPress Pro + Mojo + more RAM + ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with 256MB RAM + second internal Sata HD + Firewire storage + 2 monitors for the Mac and a big widescreen TV, and that was way less than hiring an old Film Composer for 4 months..

"Yes, but what about getting the rushes in?" I called the lab, and they told me they could do DVCam tapes instead of Betas.
"Getting the sound in?" No problem, Cantar records onto files.
"Synchronising?" No problem, XPress has the world famous AutoSync®, as featured in Film Composer.
"Playing out?" No problem, Mojo can do 24fps and 25fps, and we can hire a betacam for playouts.
"Cutting the neg?" No problem, XPress comes with Film Scribe.
"That's a deal then!"

And that's the way we went. Me on location with my Powerbook and the borrowed Mojo, the assistant in Paris with the G5, the new Mojo and
the rushes coming from the lab on DVCam tapes. I would import the BWF files into my machines (that's how we discovered the BWF import in a 24P PAL project bug, but that is a another long story - we had found a workaround), burn a copy of the resulting OMFi files along with a bin and sent it to Paris, with the overnight van taking the unprocessed film rushes to the lab. The day after, my assistant would then copy the files I burnt into the G5, and synch the sound with the picture he had digitized, using the DVCam made at the lab. Then he would put the picture OMF files and the new bins onto a hard drive which would go on location with the van, the same day. We were a small budget film, but we had a cutting room on location and a second machine back at the production. That amazed quite a few (bigger) production companies.

One last note: On the film I cut last winter, my assistant came from a FCP background. I taught him to digitize and synchronise because he hardly knew Avid. Yet, he hated it and prefered FCP which he had in college. After 3 months with me, he's a die hard fan of Avid - probably since I demonstrated the Asymetric Trim to him...!

Pierre Haberer
France
Film Credits

 

 

I was introduced to AVID DV in High School and loved it from the first experience.

When I was on the fence about AVID and FCP in 2004 - my biggest concerns were costs, speed, hardware, portability, and media management. At the time I couldn’t afford Media Composer Adrenaline, so AVID Xpress Pro & Mojo and FCP & AJA Kona were my two major options. After several quotes I found Avid to priced well under FCP and the hardware was simple enough for me to build and install myself. Personally I wanted an editing workstation that I knew inside and out, from hardware to components.

Avid has always been like my left and right hand and I couldn't get FCP up to the speed I wanted. Media management is huge in my books and having to search for files inside Avid was a synch - especially since I was running over 10 hard drives at one point. I got introduced to FCP 3 in college and found it to be straightforward and was very similar to Adobe's Premiere. FCP Studio is now the norm and its features/processes may have changed, but to me Avid is my editing workstation and always will be.

My first major broadcast project was Extreme Angler TV and my first week with the producer was pretty busy. He couldn’t believe the speed and render free abilities of Avid. He told me on many occasions that his previous editor used FCP and they would go out for a beer and come back and FCP would still be rendering!

Julian Ridi
Canada

 

 

Have an FCP to Avid success story? Let us know!